Review of Jabberwocky (1977) by Bobby L — 08 May 2010

So Yeah.

First and foremost. This is not a Monty Python movie. Terry Jones is in it, but he dies less than five minutes into the picture and does not return as a different character later. Terry Gilliam is in it, briefly, and his character is wacky pretty much for the sake of, in a dark sort of way. Michael Palin stars. However, there is a notable lack of John Cleese, Eric Idle, and Graham Chapman. Not even Carol Cleveland. While the movie is arguably just a bunch of stuff that happens, long a hallmark of Python, it has a different sensibility. For starters, it's not actually quotable at all. No fear having lines from it driven into your head by people who think you're somehow inferior if you haven't seen it. For the most part, they haven't, either, and if they have, they still can't remember any lines from it.

Dennis Cooper (Palin) is the despair of his father (Paul Curran). Despite his love for the "fair" Griselda Fishfinger (Annette Badland), Dennis leaves the village when his father dies to go earn a living in the big city so he can support his love in the fashion to which she is accustomed. Only it turns out to be hard to support anyone in the city; in the forests lurks the Jabberwocky. Jaws that bite and claws that catch per spec. It's slaughtering those unfortunate enough to be stuck outside the city's walls, and the flow of refugees has been halted by only permitting those with possessions into the city. Dennis has half a potato that Griselda gave him, but that isn't considered enough. He ends up sneaking in and having wacky adventures, also per spec.

Interestingly, the potato is one of the few anachronisms I spotted. This is doubtless helped by the fact that it's not really set in a time period more precise than "the Middle Ages," and possibly were I an armour geek I would find errors there. It's also true that not everyone will note the potato anachronism. (Potatoes were first cultivated by the Inca and therefore didn't make it into Europe until well into the sixteenth century, and they weren't much of a people food for some time after that.) At that, it's probably true that Terry Gilliam knew and threw it in there anyway. However, hygiene was . . . an iffy thing at the time, and while the princess (Deborah Fallender) is shown taking a bath midway through, the, shall we say, casual disposal of bodily wastes is not as inaccurate as we'd all like to believe.

However, the bodily wastes thing is one of the reasons I considered turning the movie off entirely. Yes, all right. We get it. There's no sewers, and people don't have any real compunction toward cleanliness. There's no need to be going on about it like that. It stops being funny awfully quickly, and Gilliam is smarter than that. The guard's going outside to relieve himself, providing Dennis with a chance to slip into the city? Okay. The other dozen or more similar jokes? No, thank you. We can do without. Likewise, the cartoonish violence starts as cute and gets awfully old awfully quickly. The movie nudges you in the ribs to make sure you notice that it's funny, and the simple fact is, movies which do that generally aren't. Sad but true.

It is all the more vexing because you can see the future quality of Gilliam's work in it. His character is digging up rocks and claiming they're diamonds, and that's not a bad metaphor for the movie itself. As time went by, Gilliam actually learned what a diamond looks like and produced a fair few; the collaborative nature of his work with Monty Python saved [i]Holy Grail[/i] from this movie's failures. However, the way it's filmed is indicative of his later work. It isn't pretty, Gods know. It's grim and filthy; that's rather the point of the thing. Not all of the shots are of things worth looking at, either. As a whole, the film fails by being too broad. However, Gilliam's eye was already present, and as long as you can distract yourself from the bad humour, there's something of value there.